EDUCATION
Why 2 Award-Winning Black Authors Were Silenced in a Tennessee School
Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa: the latest victims of the censorship crusade
If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound?” Of course, it does because the world does not begin or end at the point of your perception. Just because you are thousands of miles away from a forest doesn’t mean that the tree did not, in fact, crash to the ground and make a loud sound. The same can be said about racism in America. Black people regularly experience racism in our society, and this experience is not dependent upon White people’s acknowledgment or acceptance of these conditions. However, those advancing nationwide censorship cruscade seem to think that if a tree falls in the woods, it won’t make a sound. If they keep discussions about racism far away, out of the earshot of students, then somehow, this all goes away, as if the racism never occurred, as if the tree never fell or made a sound.
Two Black authors, Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, won a 2023 Pulitzer Prize for their non-fiction book, “His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice,” a biographical work that touches on Floyd’s life, and the conditions that led to this tragedy. Naturally, after winning this…
